Orientation, settled before anybody arrived

Where the twenty-four are

Eleven of the thirty-one places produced a light ending. Four of them produced thirteen between them.

All four of the top places were described by their households in terms of a window. For distributed work, spatial evidence is only one layer; a team can evidence for a flexible-work pilot while deciding which operational signals are necessary and which should remain outside the review.

What orientation is and is not

Orientation here means which way a room faces, which follows from how the building sits on its plot, which follows from the road, the boundary and the planning consent. Readers repeating the exercise can place this observation beside material from University of Toronto.

It is not a design choice in any sense a household could revisit, and in most cases it was not much of a choice for the designer either. A building goes where the plot allows.

So a room that takes direct sun at eleven in the morning takes direct sun at eleven in the morning for the life of the building, and the only variables are the season and the cloud.

A specification can be revised. Future buildings can have better glazing, and some do. A site cannot be revised at all.

The seasonal half

Ten of the twenty-four are darkness rather than glare, and nine of those ten come from the two weeks logged in November and February.

In those two weeks, the usable daylight in the morning is materially shorter. One of the two households logged two sittings in its back room before nine, both ended by light, both in the same week.

That is an orientation effect compounded by a time of year, and it has a consequence that the record can see only faintly: a dwelling assessed in June and a dwelling assessed in November are not the same dwelling. Nine weeks spread across the year cannot quantify that and can only flag it.

What a household can do

Three things, in ascending order of what they cost and descending order of how often anybody did them.

Move the furniture. Free, immediate, and the one thing anybody in this record actually did. One home moved a place away from a window mid-week; its light endings fell from four to one across the remaining three days.

Put something over the window. A blind, a curtain, a film. Nobody in the record did this during a logging week, so there is no evidence here either way.

Work somewhere else. This is what twenty-one of the twenty-four endings resulted in: a sitting at another place within the hour.

The three that did not move

Three light endings were followed by nothing: the working day stopped.

All three are darkness rather than glare, all three are after four in the afternoon, and all three are in the two winter weeks. A room that has got too dark at half past four in November is a room where the alternative is a lamp or the end of the day, and in three cases the answer was the end of the day.

That is the only place in the record where an ending looks like a cost rather than a move, and three entries is not enough to build anything on.

Why this is the first of the fixed constraints

Because it is the largest, and because it is the one with no remedy at any price.

Insulation can be improved, sockets can be added, a party wall can be treated, and none of those is cheap but all of them are possible. The angle between a window and the sun is not a thing anybody can buy their way out of, and it accounts for roughly a quarter of every ending in this study.

The four places, looked at together

The four places that produced thirteen of the twenty-four light endings have something in common besides windows.

All four are among the five most-used places in their dwellings. Three of the four are the place their household used on all five days.

That is the shape of the whole constraint: the rooms with the most daylight are the rooms people most want to work in, and daylight is the thing that moves them out. The failure is concentrated in the places people choose.

Thirty-six sittings between them, thirteen light endings. Just over a third of every sitting at those four places ended because of the sun, and people went back to them the next morning.

That last clause is the part worth keeping. Nobody abandoned a place because of light. They used it, were moved out of it, and returned.